Carter's Balance Sheet

A Panama plus, but overall, there are still too many minuses

It was, all in all, quite a remarkable week for James Earl Carter Jr. At its outset, the President heard that the wavering Senate might inflict a shattering blow to his prestige by rejecting the Panama Canal treaty; the next day it gave him instead a narrow but important victory. On Thursday fell the mournful first anniversary of the introduction of the energy program that Carter had once called the moral equivalent of war; the following day came news of a Senate compromise on gas deregulation and at last the possibility of a breakthrough for the energy program. On the economic front, the long grounded stock market took off like a Concorde, but Carter was informed that his tax-reform program was doomed. And in Moscow, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance was trying to make progress toward a SALT treaty that some Senators openly promised to reject.

On balance, Carter could probably look back on the troubled week as one of more gains than losses. But whether the treaty success augured a turnaround in the declining fortunes of the Carter Administration seemed questionable.

If Carter is an enigma to many voters, he is nonetheless in many ways just the kind of President that could have been expected. While he inspires neither love nor hate, he is open, unassuming and accessible. He is willing to talk to people, and he listens to what they have to say. He is not ruthless or vindictive. If he does not forgive his enemies all their transgressions, he does not try to punish them either--a forbearance very few Presidents have shown. While others may have lost confidence in him, he appears to remain serenely confident in himself. He betrays no signs of anxiety or hysteria. He is a man of good will and moral purpose.

But even those who sympathize with him are not sure what he is trying to do, and this gives them the uneasy feeling that he and his inexperienced staff may not know what they are doing either. Notes Anthony Moffett, a Democratic Congressman from Connecticut: "People are saying to him, 'Tell me where I'm going and I'm ready to go.' But they aren't getting an answer." A revealing account of this uncertainty came from a Carter campaign veteran who is now a White House aide: "I really think that for all his political career, Jimmy was so busy becoming something, so busy achieving political office that he never really had time to sit down and decide who he was and what he was politically. He was always forced to improvise as he went along. As a result, when we got to the White House, we didn't know what we wanted to do, what we wanted to be, what we wanted to sell. So we tried to do everything, be everything, sell everything."

As unease over Carter has spread, he has dropped in the polls. In the New York Times-CBS survey released this month, only 46% feel he is performing well. A Harris-ABC poll puts the approval figure at 43%, though it is up from 36% in March. The Iowa Poll, the most respected in the Midwest, indicates that Carter is in a "public opinion tailspin" that has been gaining momentum in recent months. Those giving him a favorable report plummeted from 80% a year ago to 45% this month, a drop that was exceeded only by Richard Nixon in his last year in office, during the Watergate scandal.

Growing doubts appear to cross party lines. In some regions, Democrats seem almost as disturbed as Republicans. Says Colorado Governor Richard Lamm, who faces a tough re-election battle: "Carter is definitely a political liability for any Democrats up for election in the West. I hope and pray he does better before November, but time is running out." Adds George Christian, Lyndon Johnson's former press secretary who is now a political consultant: "In Texas, Carter is going to be an issue in the Governor's race, the U.S. Senate race, the state attorney's race and the contested congressional races. If I were a Republican candidate, I'd run against Carter, and that's what they are doing."

Increasingly, the President's competence is being called into question. No one doubts his brains, and people are continually surprised by his quick grasp of complex detail. But mastering the issues is one thing; putting them in perspective and arriving at a sound judgment is something else again. So is persuading the American public to follow him. Says Iowa Democratic chairman Ed Campbell: "The President is hauling too much water at one time. He has spread himself too thin with no results--the Middle East, energy, taxes, the coal strike, inflation, the farm problem." Notes Christian: "There is a gap between confronting problems and delivering solutions."

Carter aides respond that the President is getting attacked for doing too much on the one hand, and for doing too little on the other. Yet there is a measure of truth in both charges. By simultaneously tackling too many problems, however forthrightly, Carter lacks the time to concentrate properly on any one issue. When the Panama Canal treaty was signed with a great flourish last fall, the Administration was slow in trying to build support for it. On this occasion, as on others, Carter appeared to think that the announcement of a worthy project was enough to get it accepted.

One problem that is becoming more apparent is that the President still lacks experience. This drawback was rather romantically portrayed as an asset during the campaign; Carter would come to office, his champions said, as an outsider, a man with clean hands who would shake up the jaded Establishment. But the trouble with attacking the Establishment is that only a member of the Establishment knows how it really works. The Carter White House has been lamentably short of skilled hands. It is not just in Washington that the Administration has seemed inept but in its dealings with the rest of the country as well. Frances Ohmstede, Democratic national committeewoman from Nebraska, complains: "We've been totally bypassed on everything. We used to know when someone was coming through the state, and we were kept informed. Now we hear nothing. Kennedy and Johnson always had somebody who called. I can't see why Jimmy Carter can't do the same thing. There's a feeling now that he's scuttling us."

The President is also faulted for trying to solve problems by drafting overly "comprehensive" programs and handing them to Congress for prompt approval. Welfare reform, civil service reform, tax reform were all announced with fanfare but have not moved far toward adoption. Congress is hardly blameless since it is more rebellious and disorganized than ever, and occasionally inclined to show the newcomer in the White House that he is not the boss. Yet Carter has persisted in policies that have not won sufficient support for passage. His energy legislation was too hastily assembled without consulting enough relevant groups. It placed too much emphasis on conservation through high taxation, not enough on providing incentives to search for the energy that is considered to be abundant in the U.S.

The President instructed his staff last week to drum up support for his tax-reform bill. But since the program entails higher taxes for many, it has a small constituency indeed. And there is already a revolt brewing over the explosive increase in Social Security taxes that was passed by Congress last December. It almost seems as if Carter is oblivious to the is sue. Congress, keenly feeling the wrath of its constituents, is not. Disregarding the President, the House Ways and Means Committee began voting down Carter's tax-reform proposals last week. "The trouble with Carter," said Barber B. Conable Jr. of New York, ranking Republican on the Ways and Means Committee, "is he's listening only to God--and God doesn't pay taxes."

Carter's greatest vulnerability, however, may be overseas. A President has a freer hand in foreign policy than in domestic matters, but he also has more of an opportunity to make mistakes. West European and Japanese leaders are increasingly alarmed by Carter's habit of moralizing without a proper appreciation of power realities, a tendency they feel is all the more exaggerated in one of his assistant policymakers, Andrew Young. They fear, above all, that Carter may be weakening the U.S. capacity to stand up to the still adventurous and aggressive Soviet Union. He has taken a series of actions they find dismaying: ordering a U.S. troop withdrawal (which he reduced somewhat last week) from South Korea, canceling the B-1 bomber, responding tepidly to Soviet intervention on the African horn, waffling on the neutron bomb and then deciding to postpone his decision. Moreover, he has asked Russia for nothing comparable in return for these unilateral actions. In West Germany, where his reputation is lowest, Carter is considered by some officials to be the worst President since World War II. In Britain, he has been supported by Labor Prime Minister James Callaghan, but recently he has come under savage fire from a variety of politicians and journalists.

After the neutron bomb uproar, Sir Ian Gilmour, defense spokesman in the Tory shadow government, lashed out: "There have been weeks of leaks and contradictions, and after an orgy of weakness and vacillation, the wrong decision has finally been reached. Mr. Carter has been scared off the neutron weapon by the Russian propaganda barrage. It now seems that the Kremlin has virtually a right of veto on weapons that NATO is allowed to deploy."

Amid the mounting criticism, it is worth recalling that every American President has been subject to similar attacks, some of them fair, some of them not. Even if Carter had performed skillfully, he would not have been immune to harsh criticism. Facing a fiscal 1979 budget deficit of $60 billion and another outbreak of inflation, he simply cannot afford to give the groups that voted for him--labor, environmentalists, liberals, blacks--all that they are demanding. His evenhanded policy in the Middle East, while sometimes clumsily executed, would have been criticized by Jewish groups no matter how astutely it had been carried out. Carter also occupies a reduced presidency of which imperial demands are still being made. He is the focus of relentless scrutiny by a characteristically critical Washington press corps. Congress, reflecting the mood of the country as well as its own problems, is more fractious and disputatious than in the past, and a record number of lobbyists all clamor for what they consider to be their due. No President could possibly satisfy all these importunate groups.

Still, the reality is that he must satisfy some of the groups at least some of the time if he is going to succeed as President. Fully aware of his plight, Carter took his White House staff to Camp David the weekend before the Panama vote for a thorough review of what had gone wrong and for some new, stricter marching orders. One of the participants remarked afterward: "It's just about as tough as Carter can be. I wish he'd get tougher with all of us."

The White House staff will be shaken up to some extent, and Robert Strauss has been given the job of anti-inflation czar. But the staff lacks heavyweights or even mediumweights to attend to the nation's business. Carter has reached a stage where he needs all the experience he can get, and there is plenty around in the Democratic Party and even the Republican if the President chooses to seek it out. While engaging and energetic, his present staff is not adequate for the job of running the country nor is it properly supervised and directed from above. The President is probably much less self-righteously rigid and more shrewdly pragmatic than many people assume; he has the potential for growing in the office, as so many of his predecessors have done. But as nearly everyone points out, he does not have a great deal of time left.

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